A few months ago I attended the Pacific Union Conference Ministerial Meetings in Ontario, CA.. While there I attended a seminar by Pastor Carlton Byrd has in the very near past become the speaker/director of Breath of Life Ministries and also just recently became the new Senior Pastor of the Oakwood University Seventh-day Adventist Church in Hunstville, Alabama.
I attended the seminar because I wanted to learn from Pastor Byrd, not about preaching, which he is a great preacher, but about how wherever he has gone his churches has grown (yes I know part of that has to do with great preaching)? I believe it was last year at the church he is now transferring from Berean Church that they baptized 800 folk. Their membership is now 4077 people, they have three sevices, they have a closed circuit feed into their basement for the overflow of folk, and all of this without being attached to a Seventh-day Adventist school of higher education (in the United States our mega-churches have typically only existed next to our colleges).
So I was curious…people come to your church for great preaching, but 800 in one year don’t get baptized without first of all the Spirit of God, but secondly some intentionality.
The following are the notes I took. I didn’t edit them or pick and choose what I thought was great or not. I am simply sharing with you the thoughts I wrote down from him in this seminar.
“I’ve never had a vision for ministry I could afford; If I did, it wouldn’t be from God.”
“Do good (pardon my English) just to do good and God will bless you.”
“If worship is to contribute to the growth of your church, three things must be true:
“The greatest advertisement for your church is word of mouth.”
“Intentional careful selection of parking supervisors, greeters, ushers, and worship leaders must be done!”
“Don’t let people box you in!”
“Sabbath needs to be a celebration!”
“We can’t do music just to please older generation.”
“We’ve kept our hymnals but lost our children.”
“Should the church be held hostage over someone picking at the instruments? NO!”
“The Senior Pastor should be involved in decision of what songs we are going to do.”
“Singers sing, preachers preach. Don’t let your singers get up there and think they can preach a sermon or share something they think is just so wonderful. They are there to sing.”
“Don’t let your minister of music say, ‘I am running this (worship). LET’S BE CLEAR, there is ONE leader! If there were multiple leaders in Israel the children would still be slaves in Egypt. God gives the vision of the ministry to the leader and it is not a compromise of your idea and my idea.”
Evangelistic Outreach:
“An evangelistic cycle throughout the year with good worship, a friendly environment, and strong leadership will grow.”
“Build database from EVERYTHING done at or through your church. I have over 8,000 names in our database that are not members but have attended one of our events.”
“Send communication by Monday to every visitor within two days of their visit.”
A Bible Workers work six weeks before the evangelistic meetings:
“When folk come to our public campaigns and become interested or are baptized they are assigned a Spiritual Guardian. We don’t want to just baptize people, we also want to keep them. We don’t want people going out the back door where we wouldn’t notice, especially in our large church.”
“Singers sing & preachers preach” (seriously he said it again, must be a pet peeve)
Typical length of meetings 2 weeks 5 & 5
I always cover and usually go in this order:
“I always then do some special midweek. Why? I don’t want someone that just was convicted of the Sabbath or true church or something like that to then go back to their church and be discouraged from our message. I don’t want them at their old church I want them at Berean!”
“I do two to three public campaigns a year.”
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And those are my notes from Pastor Byrd. Some powerful stuff. He is a dynamic individual that beleives 100% in what he is doing and Whom he is serving!
So I was going to get on here and rant about how our Adventist publishing houses were dropping the ball by not having ebooks available! But before I spouted I decided to do a quick search and I found this by Pacific Press Publishing & this by Review & Herald Publishing. So my rant is not going to be quite as intense. But I still want to rant a little. I praise the Lord that I see the church entering into the realm of ebooks, but their progression into this realm is far too slow and under marketed!
As much as I love books in my hand and as much as I didn’t want to embrace the tablet culture I find that almost all of my reading is now done on my Kindle! The only things I haven’t been able to read primarily on my Kindle, my Adventist literature. For those items I have to drive 45 minutes north to the nearest Adventist Book Center, which means I’m not reading most of the new Adventist material out there.
Every single published material of the Seventh-day Adventist church from books to magazines should be available through the kindle store, the Nook store, or whatever is the preferred reader of choice. (Pacific Press seems to be ahead of the rest on this, most of Review & Herald stuff is primarily in google book format which is cumbersome). I believe that if our publishing institutions did this then we would increase readership in many areas and spread the message much more quickly.
Let me give you two recent scenarios to illustrate my point:
Two of the preachers I appreciate most, Dwight Nelson & David Asscherick were discussing on twitter a quote by NT Wright from his book Justification. Because this book is not Adventist I knew that I could immediately go to Amazon Kindle Store and purchase that book. On the same day Pastor Dwight plugged his most recent devotional book, “The Chosen.”
Yes, there is a link to Amazon to buy the book. But if you went to Amazon as I am writing this, you would notice that there is only one copy, and it is being sold for $15, not including shipping and handling. So if I buy it there I have to wait on it and pay almost $20 for it. Or I can drive 45 mins north and buy it at the Adventist Book Center…or maybe which is what probably quite a few folk do, they just don’t buy it.
But say that same book was available through the Kindle store like Justification is. Then if a person read that tweet of Dwight’s (and a lot of folk read those tweets: Dwight has been on twitter for a little over three weeks and he already has well over 300 followers), and being a person that uses twitter so probably also uses other techno stuff, they jump on their iphone kindle or Nook app and they immediately go to the kindle store and Download the book which is sent wirelessly to their kindle, iphone, and ipad all at once and it was for only $9.99 versus $20. Answering me this, which seems more convenient?
Yes we won’t for a very long time completely get rid of books on paper, and indeed there are many people that don’t use any of the technology I am speaking of, but there are enough people that do use tablet readers that for us to not flood that market with our materials is just a lack of foresight and evangelistic creativity on our parts! 11% of all the United States alone have a tablet computer that is equal to 44 million people. And then think about these facts just in light of Amazon and their Kindle:
As of early 2011, Amazon had over 137 million active customers worldwide.
110 of 111 New York Times Bestsellers are in the Kindle Store.
Amazon’s Kindle Store pays out 70% to its Direct-to-Kindle authors.
Since April 2011, for every 100 print books sold on Amazon, it’s sold 105 Kindle books.
So far this year, Amazon has sold more than three times as many Kindle books as last year.
These statistics continue to rise. It begs the question – why aren’t Adventists marketing Kindle books like crazy! What’s holding us back from our piece of the Kindle pie?
One more area where I see us getting into the e-market really benefitting our readership, and that is with the Adventist Review, and our other magazine publications. I get the Adventist World just like all other baptized SDA’s, but I would probably subscribe to the Adventist Review if I could do so through Kindle. I mean I can read, Newsweek, Fortune, & Runner’s World on my Kindle why not the Adventist Review. I was once having a conversation with Bill Knott the editor and executive publisher of AR, and he was saying to me that one of his desires is to see readership of the Church’s flagship paper up amongst the younger generations! I would say to my friend, Elder Knott, get it on the Kindle and other such devices and market it and watch the level of subcribership potentially go up!
So that is my rant! I’m glad to see something is happening, but outside of Pacific Press, much more needs to be taking place! We should not be the tail of things, but the head!
When Christina and I walked into Saddleback’s Sanctuary I was amazed at how many people I saw! (I took the picture below about 10 minutes before the service started). The seating capacity of the sanctuary is 3500 so I would estimate there were about 2000 folk in the main sanctuary (there are several other locations on campus that hold worshipers for different styles of worship: praise only, hymns only, hip hop, etc.. I’m not sure if these all go on Sabbath though or only on Sunday), plus folk at ten other campuses around Southern California that the sermon is fed live to.
Here is why the large amount of people at this worship service struck me. I have heard over the course of my ministry career that the reason more people don’t attend Seventh-day Adventist churches, is because they don’t want to go to church on Saturday. I’m thinking this may be an excuse! Because what I saw were a lot of people that were there on a Sabbath to worship. In fact most large churches now have at least one Saturday service. And most people I talk to their big obstacle of attending church is not that we have the worship service on Saturday. Let me throw in a quick caveat: I do understand that the way we teach Sabbath is different, we believe Saturday is the day for worship, rather than just an option, and I recognize this could be a barrier for some. But overall again as I talk to different folk that are guests at our church they aren’t hung-up on attending on Saturday, we think they are, because it gives us an out, but sorry that OUT doesn’t really exist anymore in most areas of this country (especially with folk 50 and under).
So if people aren’t attending Seventh-day Adventist churches and the reason is not because of Sabbath versus Sunday worship? Then why? It is a question we need to be asking ourselves! Yes accepting the Sabbath as a Holy Day may be challenging, but come on folk is it any more challenging than: A baby being born to a virgin and a carpenter growing-up and discovering that He used to be in Heaven and that His real dad isn’t that carpenter but is actually God in Heaven and He wasn’t conceived through intercourse but by the Holy Spirit planting Him in His mothers belly. Then He walked this earth for 3 1/2 years and at the end of those years He was convicted of no crime and yet He was still hung-on a tree, and 3 days later an angel rolled away the stone and folded up His grave clothes. Then He was picked up by some angels and went to Heaven. And what He left behind were about 120 totally sold out followers of His and they were hanging out praying when tongues of fire came out of heaven and into the room they were in and they started speaking in languages so that whoever heard them whatever language they spoke they could be understood…and “about three thousand were added to their number that day” (Acts 2:41) and “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47). I guess the Sabbath doesn’t seem like such an obstacle when I think of that message that Peter and the rest preached.
So what could it be?
The North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists has come out with a new initiative, “REACH North America” I believe the foci of this initiative are spot on, that said I am concerned. I am concerned because while the language is new and well focused, I worry that the methods are going to be the “same ‘ole same ‘ole”. Why do I have this worry? Because the first major event related to REACH is a Net Evangelism event. This event is taking place in the Fall of 2011 and already I have received a number of things in the mail (both snail mail and e-mail) promoting this event. It seems this is the major thrust of the NAD’s strategy for this year. I believe in evangelism, I have no problem with Net events, but I am challenged by the reality that our rate of growth has been in decline for the last couple of decades and yet we seem to be going back to the same well over and over again. In the mid to late 90’s and into the early ’00’s we had numerous Net events. I personally was blessed by two of these events tremendously, Net ’96 and Net ’98, that said my blessing doesn’t negate the reality that these were the major evangelistic events of the last couple decades and yet here we are in 2010 trying to figure out how to stem the decline of our church in North America. So we are in decline even though we had Net Events throughout the last two decades, and what are we pushing with great might this year again? Another Net event! The definition of stupidity according to Albert Einstein is, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Please hear me, I am not saying Net events should be eliminated, I just believe if we think a Net event is going to play a major role in stemming our decreased growth, and I hope I am wrong, but I am afraid we’re just being “stupid.” I believe Seth Godin’s counsel is key here, “If it’s a new problem, perhaps it demands a new approach. If it’s an old problem, it certainly does.” Folks after 15-20 years of this struggle to reach North America the problem is an old problem, it definitely demands a new approach not the same ‘ole same ‘ole!
If I ever wrote a book about church, I believe one of the chapters would be centered around the idea of how we need to fire every pastor, including me, and start all over! I think at times we as Pastors have forgotten why we are called, “to reach the lost for Jesus.” We think we are pastors to write good sermons, to visit sick people, to solve petty issues of floor color and musical styles. Maybe we have no idea why we are pastors? Which is why we should all be fired or quit and go from there. I once read, or heard, can’t remember which now, that James White’s philosophy (one of the founders of the Seventh-day Adventist church) on hiring ministers was that an individual would first have to show that they could raise up a church that could sustain them in ministry, and then the denomination would hire these individuals. I love this idea! It would force us as pastors to REACH the lost! I love this idea so much that when I was nearing the end of graduate school at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, MI., I suggested the idea to my wife Christina. I asked her what she would think of us choosing a place to live based on the need for a church to be planted and availability for her to have a job. Then we would raise-up, through God’s power, a church. And once it was established we would then see if the local Seventh-day Adventist conference was interested in coming along side and partnering with us. Since at the time I had a conference that was already ready to pay me to pastor, and she had just supported me through graduate school, the idea didn’t sit so well with her 🙂 (I still present it every now and then and I think she is softening to it). I still love the idea, not because I want to quit my job or because I don’t like to get paid for what I do. I like the idea because I would then be reminded daily of why I am a pastor, to reach the lost for Jesus Christ. I pray that I don’t ever forget that is my reason for being a pastor and if I do forget, someone please fire me!!!!